Red Ensign Triple X
Red Ensign Standard #30 is now up at Quotaliciousness.
The lastest collections of writings from members of the Red Ensign Brigade for the last two weeks.
A Leaf on the Wind
Rue and I went to see Serenity this afternoon. A great movie that did not disappoint. In the spirit of things I decided to take a quiz that Rue took earlier.
In common with Wash, I do have a stunning wife that could probably kill people (no evidence of past events are in my possession)...
 | You scored as Hoban 'Wash' Washburne. The Pilot. You are a leaf on the wind, see how you soar. You have a good job, and a stunning wife who loves you (and can kill people). Life is good, which is why you can't help smiling. Now if you can just get people to actually listen to your opinion things would be perfect.
Which Serenity character are you? created with QuizFarm.com |
Smurfovik Collective Bombed!
Apparently the UN has produced a video showing the Smurf's getting bombed (no, not drunk! Bombed: as in planes dropping them, buildings burning etc.)Last week, on Belgian television, the UN children's agency premiered the first adult movie featuring the Smurfs. By "adult", I don't mean it was a blue movie. Only the characters were blue. But it was an adult movie in the sense that the Smurfs were massacred during an air strike on their village, until, in the final scene, only Baby Smurf is left, weeping alone surrounded by wall-to-wall Smurf corpses. It's the first Smurf snurf movie.
Mark Steyn comments here:
Oh, well. It's not clear from the Smurf carnage whether their village is a sovereign jurisdiction - the ultimate blue state - or whether they're merely some hapless minority within a multi-ethnic nation, the Kosovars to Elmo's Slobodan. But either way the warplanes come and blue body parts are exploding all over the village.
Good luck to Unicef and all. But I can't help thinking that, if you are that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict is like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of west Africa, air strikes are few and far between. Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of Eutopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly low-tech, non-state-of-the-art ways.
Good luck to Unicef and all. But I can't help thinking that, if you are that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict is like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of west Africa, air strikes are few and far between. Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of Eutopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly low-tech, non-state-of-the-art ways.
Chris Taylor celebrates the end of the Reign of Blue Terror:
Sadly, these efforts are a quarter-century too late. If only the Smurf advance had been halted before they (briefly) took over Saturday morning programming in the early Eighties. All guys wanted to watch was good, clean fighter-piloting, alien-destroying fun like Robotech and Voltron. What we got instead was a weekly Marxist morality tale dressed up as lame toy-commercial fodder. Innocent children were subjected to mind-numbing tales of the Smurfovik collective, packaged in a slightly different way each week, broadcast over and over and over again:
Some individualist smurf with unique skills (or a one-dimensional personality trait) would invariably get his ass into trouble via the free exercise of his talents/trait, and get captured by the evil wizard Gargamel. Sooner or later a couple of smurf buddies would come looking for him, discover his precarious situation, and then -- lacking any sort of their own initiative -- they'd take the problem to Papa "Uncle Joe" Smurf who would solve the problem through centralised planning and state-funded magic. Then Papa's sidekick Brainy "Trotsky" Smurf would lecture the offender on his failure to fully embrace dialectical smurfism, and he'd be banished to the gulag until next week. Unless one of Papa Smurf's cronies fell out of favour (dying mysteriously in bed due to a freak ice pick accident), whereby the offender was rehabilitated early.
Some individualist smurf with unique skills (or a one-dimensional personality trait) would invariably get his ass into trouble via the free exercise of his talents/trait, and get captured by the evil wizard Gargamel. Sooner or later a couple of smurf buddies would come looking for him, discover his precarious situation, and then -- lacking any sort of their own initiative -- they'd take the problem to Papa "Uncle Joe" Smurf who would solve the problem through centralised planning and state-funded magic. Then Papa's sidekick Brainy "Trotsky" Smurf would lecture the offender on his failure to fully embrace dialectical smurfism, and he'd be banished to the gulag until next week. Unless one of Papa Smurf's cronies fell out of favour (dying mysteriously in bed due to a freak ice pick accident), whereby the offender was rehabilitated early.
Again, the U.N. has stuck it's nose into children's programming, and brought back those vile Smurfs, whose programming pushed the anvil-dropping, dynamite 'sploding Bugs Bunny Road Runner show off of the local affiliate that was one of the few channels that would run decent Saturday morning cartoons (ie. not censored of the ol' ultra-violence).
The last time I noticed the U.N. sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong was the vile collectivist lecture Kofi Annan gives the Sesame Street gang about doing things the "U.N. Way":
I wonder if Kofi Annan's son would be skimming off the "Cookies for Trash" program set up to help all the innocent starving worms under President Oscar the Grouch's totalitarian thumb.
Before I start getting emails criticizing me for displaying shocking callousness towards victims of war and the very real suffering that results, note that I reserve all my venom for the Smurfs (not the innocent victims that they are supposed to be proxy for) the U.N., which has some of the most barbarous regimes running their so-called "human rights" committee, and has shown an over-whelming propensity for preserving the status quo above all else, and the superior smug attitude of those who would appropriate children's programming in an attempt to indoctrinate our young'uns in the "glories" of collectivist ideals.
And of course Mark Steyn's got it right: you know who the U.N. is directing this ad-campaign against.
Doin' the Happy Dance
So what's the big secret?
Am I going north to drop in on Temujin, even though he came to Kelowna and didn't visit me?
No that'd be nice. But how does that improve my life?
Did I win a lottery?
No, that'd be nice too. But the site would be a lot fancier, and there'd be a lot of "Ha Ha! I'm so damn rich and you're not!" posts, so no that's not it either.
I went and got myself a better job. Big deal, you say. Fine, I say. I didn't ask you to come over here and rain on my parade, now did I?
I did say that it was important to me, and important to my family. With my current job I drive back and forth every day from Kelowna to Penticton, robbing me of about one and a half to two hours of my day commuting.
OK my commute kind of looks like this, so I shouldn't be complaining (this photo doesn't do the view justice, especially in fall.)
But now I'm doing the happy dance!
New job, closer to home, more money, better organization (lots more impressive on business cards!), better title, my own stinkin' office (wooooo!) and the ability to threaten friends of mine with poking into their files of past business dealings and results with said organization. And all I have to do is take the body blows when the non-financial-speaking revenue producers are called on the carpet to explain to the budget chiefs in Vancouver why they're spending so much damn money. All this and Excel models, too!
WOOOOOO!
It's funny. Thinking back to when Rue, the little princesses and I moved here over a year ago, this was the exact job I had envisioned myself having, and with this organization too. I guess Rue's right. A little positive thinking can go a long way. And a man can accomplish great personal things if he has the right person supporting him every step of the way.
Thanks, hon!
Did I forget to say WOOOOOO!
The New NHL
As I was engaged in making my picks for Hockey Pool #3 this evening, I got to watch the Ottawa-Toronto game, and the Vancouver-Phoenix game. And so far so good for the new NHL. The games were faster, some nice goals were scored, and hilights from the other games in the league show that scoring is up. The shoot out at the end of the Ottawa-Toronto game was exciting, and that was a good choice for the league to make. Of course it also helped that Ottawa won. Let's hope that the NHL consistently enforces the new rules, and that the players adapt to them quickly. Welcome back NHL, I missed you.
Secret Identity
When I first started this blog - and no one in the real world knew that I had it - I could cut loose with any old detail about my personal and professional life and it wouldn't matter: nobody knew me and nobody cared - it was a nice safe little public place to vent and scream and do whatever I felt like.
But then I had to go and ruin it because I wanted people to read it. And then they started to ask me about things I was writing. And then I got stage fright because people in the real world that I knew and that knew me in a certain context started to know about the other things I was thinking about.
So what has this got to do with anything?
I have news.
Big news (to me at least. It won't effect YOUR lives any...)
And I can't say a damn thing about it here because there are secret listeners (And to you secret listeners: no, Rue's not pregnant! Shut up about that...)
When I can say something about it I will, but I'm just steaming to let it out!
Sleep is becoming elusive due to the excitement.
Reunited. Does it feel so good?
Today is the 15th anniversary of the reunification of East and West Germany.
It's a little disconcerting that my generation was the last one that had any particular fear of total nuclear annihilation from a confrontation of superpowers. The scruffy teenagers that go to the trendy protests have no memories of what it was like with a wall through the heart of Germany and "us" on this side and "them" on their side with a lot of razor wire, attack dogs and machine guns to keep their own people from fleeing the oppression of the Iron Curtain.
I have relatives who lived on both sides of the wall. It's sad that some of them are almost nostalgic for the "good ol' days" of Communist East Germany...
Surprised? I'm not
Svend's coming back
He will make it official in two weeks' time and when he does, the former New Democrat MP will announce he's running against Liberal MP Hedy Fry in Vancouver Centre, a riding many see as a natural for Mr. Robinson because of its large gay community. In 1988, Mr. Robinson became the first MP to declare his homosexuality, and went on to become a passionate crusader for gay and lesbian rights in Canada.
...and then supposedly lost his head and stole an engagement ring for his partner, turning himself in before the police arrested him ($64,000 rings usually have video security on them.)
After last year's federal election, Mr. Robinson was hired by the BC Government Employees' Union to do some advocacy work. Most believed it would be a long time, if ever, before he contemplated a return to politics. He thought so too, for a few months anyway, but he gradually found himself reading Hansard on-line and watching C-SPAN and devouring The Globe and Mail for political news out of Ottawa.
He couldn't help himself. Politics is in his DNA.
He couldn't help himself. Politics is in his DNA.
Hmmm. Hopefully the propensity for thieving isn't.
And what of the supposed "mental health disorder" that was the rallying point that everyone who wanted to support "poor Svend" used as an excuse for THEFT. Some disorder if he could just go away for a couple of months and then return - ALL BETTER NOW - would I be a bad person if I questioned this? Would I be taking it out on the mentally ill if I pointed out that he will be under even more pressure upon his return? Pressure that might make someone without this "mental disorder" crack just as readily.
Why would he subject himself to this again?
Am I just a cynic in thinking that this is just the latest step in a plan that was hatched the second he realized that he couldn't get away with stealing something so conspicuous in April 2004? Will this plan work?
Sometimes you can count on the gullibility of others. Especially voters.
I wonder if Sheila's next on the comeback trail?
Page 1 of 1 pages
| October 2005 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
Recent Comments
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
[Rue] on 01/24/07 11:09 : With bated breath I await your return to blogging. [go]
Gross Display of Most Naked Capitalism
Blogroll
Red Ensign Blogs for Victory!
-- One of the Original Red Ensigns carried by the Penticton 1st Volunteers. It was present at Vimy Ridge when our little Dominion stood up and became a nation worth fighting for...
And Lastly...
